it's not a bird or a plane it's a drone and in recent years the u.s. has relied heavily on the drone program to wage a war on terror around the globe so why is the mainstream media finally starting to pay attention to the top secret program and what do we really know about drones will question more next. and there's an amendment here in the u.s. to protect citizens from unreasonable search and seizures but don't tell that to the department of homeland security they've decided travelers can have their electronics seized in the contents searched near all u.s. borders how is this possible we'll look into that in just a moment. plus both congress and president obama have said immigration reform must happen here in the u.s. but will the program include a guest worker plan will shine a light on the dark history of the past us guest worker programs coming up.

it's monday february eleventh four pm in washington d.c. i'm making lopez and you're watching r t well it's not a bird not quite a plane hits an unmanned aerial vehicle that's dominating newspaper headlines cable coverage and confirmation hearings these days but it's not necessarily their surveillance aspects that has everyone riled up it's the cold blooded characteristics of this machine that has the networks talking. there is disturbing news out of washington tonight according to a memo that was obtained by n.b.c. news officials inside the justice department have drafted a document saying the president has the legal authority to use of unmanned drones attack of the drones the american government is launching a new war some of this country's seventy five hundred drones may be about to take off with new targets in their sights i am however by the secrecy the lack of transparency and lack of oversight of the drone program the issue of drones an

extra judicial killings has become so mainstream that even former defense secretary robert gates is speaking out about ways to make the program more palatable over the weekend he came out in support of a special independent court to evaluate the necessity of given drone strikes meanwhile lawmakers and civilians alike are demanding more oversight for the drone program almost ten years after it started so for the very latest on this issue i'm joined now by stephen cohen stanley cohen that is an international human rights lawyer hey there stanley afternoon let's start with the the media aspect of this story i mean is it getting enough coverage is it getting enough of the right coverage well as long as it seems that the kids being killed the civilians being killed and we know there's been a thousand civilians that we know of and several hundred as long as their names are muhammad's or topic it seems to be ok there's a double standard our kids are precious but the sons and daughters and civilians

being murdered by this program or not it's not going to see good for a decade but all of a sudden it's become a very hip issue to debate because of brendan's appearance in front of the congress which i might note is really turned into sort of a love fest where very few people are recognizing or noting that it's criminal it is a violation of international law and just trying to clean it up now as i mentioned earlier robert gates has joined several other lawmakers in calling out for a special court to oversee these drone strikes he did it this weekend let's take a look at that. you know we have this foreign intelligence surveillance court that approves the use of electronic surveillance on american citizens so you have an independent person a federal judge outside of outside of the executive branch it's just for surveillance as rent and this is for electronic surveillance or something similar whether it's a panel of three judges or one judge or some something that would give the american

people confidence that that there was in fact a compelling case to be to launch an attack against an american citizen so stanley how likely is this to happen and what does satisfy human rights advocates such as yourself. rubbish the foreign intelligence surveillance act has approved ninety nine point nine percent of every application ever made and that's just to listen to someone that's not to murder children it's not to murder civilians there have been four examples that i'm aware of where the fights the court turned down an application because of misspelling the judges said go back spell them correctly and we'll do it the fact of the matter is if judges approve the murder of people overseas it just involves a second branch in a violation of international law the united states under international law cannot must not in under no stretch of the imagination is justified in the use of drones

in the execution and the extrajudicial assassination of not just americans of anyone overseas for years we have charged people we have extradited people we've indicted people we've convicted many people charged with crimes of terrorism and it's worked before but this is an administration which is a namrud with clean murder with clean killing that's what president obama likes and now we're just trying to clean it up further the presence of a phase of court does nothing to one resolve the problems under international law to does nothing to make it legal in three is nothing but a rubber stamp the one i'm going to resign as robert gates did say that more oversight might be necessary he's also a huge supporter of the drone program he says that it results in less collateral damage than any other weapon that the u.s. has is that the case now when it begs the question the issue isn't that it involved kills less children are killed less civilians under international law we do not

have a right to engage in any sorts of attacks if this is about obedience to international law whether it's a drone whether it's an invasion whether it's what israel does with the use of phosphorous weapons it's illegal so let's call it what it is it's murder if you're trying to clean it up it still is murder it is still illegal and no fi support makes the a sad. a nation without due process without charges trials in a conviction lawful now stanley rand paul senator rand paul also spent a good time as a good part of the weekend talking about drone strikes i want to play a part of what he said and c.n.n. and then i will come back and get your opinions. where do you stand on u.s. drones targeting american citizens who are suspected of supporting al qaeda or being involved in terrorist plots killing them without any judicial review really troubled by their ministration there was a document leaked that says that an imminent threat doesn't have to be an immediate

threat someone on my staff said you know only a bunch of lawyers could say that an imminent threat doesn't have to be immediate so i'm concerned about a bunch of people from the executive branch sitting around a table with flash cards saying you want to kill him what do you think should we kill him or what do you think now obviously stanley you disagree with using drones but to many americans these strikes are much more palatable than sending americans into war so how can you argue against against drones in that context and are you going to be willing to or other human rights advocates willing to tell these american families that hey you have to send your americans and to war your sons and daughter we were not at war in pakistan we're not it war in yemen we're not at war in lebanon we're not in war in somalia if you want to clear war if you want to follow international law if you want to make your case to play by the rules the fact of the matter is no matter what you call this it's murder it's assassination it's illegal israel is tried it for years and ultimately they stopped to some

degree because the international court said you can't do it look you either follow international law or not let's not confuse this with some notion that we're going into afghanistan where we are quote engaged in war that's been declared even though it hasn't we're talking about murdering civilians we're talking about attacks by drones in countries that are our allies if there were persons there that we are want that are wanted american citizens yemenis citizens pakistani citizens somali citizens for crimes here you go to the countries you extradite him you charge them you bring them to trial it's worked for decades in this country it's we're all over the first world trade center bombing all interest and weren't for nine eleven we're going to have to actually in the interview there unfortunately we're out of time stanley cohen a international human rights lawyer thanks for joining us thank you. now in case you haven't been following the case christopher dorner is a thirty three year old u.s. navy lieutenant who served in iraq before becoming joining they l.a.p.d.

he was fired from the force in two thousand and nine and has promised to extract revenge on the department for its transgressions against him allegedly he remains on the run the l.a.p.d. and other nearby police agencies last week embarked on a huge manhunt to find dorner however in the process two separate incidents occurred where police officers fired on vehicles they claimed were similar to dorner injuring three innocent people but the vehicles really weren't all that similar in fact this is how the attorney of the two of the victims describes the incident. bugles a different color. the license plate doesn't match there's nothing there for you to start shooting people and even if the. person in question you know mr dorner you saw to give him an opportunity to get out you can't just start a new street street justice so is the l.a.p.d. making more the situation even more dangerous with the first fire first and ask

questions later tactics that they are currently employing well only answer that i'm joined by tracy oppenheimer producer at wright reason television hey there tracy as i mentioned three innocent peace people have been injured as a result of this hunt two more hispanic women one was a man who weighed one hundred pounds less than the suspect so first of all how did the police get it so wrong and why did they open fire without confirming that it was in fact him. it's a great question when i spoke with the lawyer christopher driscoll he's representing the two women who were injured in the truck and he just said you know they jumped the gun they were trigger happy is a really high intensity ration of course this is not anywhere near justification for what happened i mean he said he counted over for fifty bullet holes and there were also bullet marks in the surrounding area surrounding cars surrounding houses so clearly they were just lighting it up and without without any rationale well it's really a miracle if there really was fifty bullet holes it's really

a miracle that they were actually able to survive so is this just unfortunate or is this a case of recklessness and something that the police need to be aware of in the future well they're actually calling it mistaken identity which i mean if you look at it they never tried to identify the women they never tried to identify the man if they had it's obvious that it wasn't christopher dorner and so i mean it was very reckless it was very excessive and i don't know how they haven't been able to own up to it at this point now let me ask you this there were some two hundred ninety eight murders in los angeles in two thousand and twelve obviously this man is different he's trained to kill but could it be argued that they're going after this man so hard because he's targeting their own. yeah absolutely i want it one of the other things lawyer discussed with me is when cops feel like they're being chased or hunted you know they get into this brother mentality and they get put on the defensive as well as the offensive and i think that's really definitely what's

going on here let's move the conversation now is the topic of police brutality an l.a. police officer under invest is now under investigation for claims that he actually threatened a woman with jail time if she refused to have sex with him there was also a case where police beat a boy for riding a skateboard on the wrong side of the road and another incident where this police officer slammed a nurse into the ground after she mailed off to him so is this are these examples in this recent incident of with them firing at three innocent people and examples of them just not following by their own standards or are these outliers yeah i mean one of the one of the articles i read talked about with one of the swat officer saying they're trained to stop if there's if there's an incident they aren't trained to kill and clearly this is not the case you don't need fifty bullet holes in addition to shooting out tires to stop a suspect regardless of whether the suspects are actually in the car so i mean

obviously they aren't exactly following protocol here to say the least would you say this is is this part of the culture of the l.a.p.d. or is that kind of taking it too far. it's i what i mean l.a.p.d. there's a lot of good cops out there i don't think that the good cops should take the fall for the bad ones but i mean this is an ongoing problem and i think the culture of the l.a.p.d. they should be working on this. i think the cops who are responsible for this instant incidence they're on administrative leave right now so i mean i don't know what's going to happen in the courts if they're going to be personally prosecuted but. i think a lot of people are worried that they're going to get off easy and i hope that doesn't happen while ministry of leave is pretty much the standard procedure for a police officer when they actually discharge their pistol but let's let's turn the conversation one more time do you think that there are all of a kind of time where a police chief or a police commissioner will come out and say that there are institutional problems

within the department that need to be addressed i haven't heard it in especially by them leaving it as mistaken identity in this case and not really owning up to what actually happened i don't see that happening of course i don't have a crystal ball o. be great if they did and they did start to promote some institutional change but i'm not a fortune teller i don't know. the oppenheimer producer reason t.v. thank you so much for your opinions thank you. well if you saw the us was susceptible to cyber attacks before get ready for this a new intelligence assessment by the government is beginning to reveal the magnitude of cyber attacks in the countries responsible for them they reported a case that sustain hacks are a threat to both national security as well as economic competitiveness in the past the defense industry has worried about government agencies being targeted however it's private companies and financial institutions that are increasingly at risk representative mike rogers one of the men behind the defunct cyber legislation

known as cispa notes that ninety five percent of all private sector networks are vulnerable to these hits many of already experienced an attack but are reluctant to step forward to sorties or if they're afraid that it's actually going to hurt their shareholders in fact some estimates put the value of information stolen and around four hundred billion dollars per year now on the other hand privacy advocates worry that this new focus on cyber protections might actually reinstate reignite the cyber legislation debate representative rogers himself is expected to reintroduce the cispa bill this week speaking to the washington post an anonymous official states that energy finance information technology aerospace and automotive industries have all been hacked the main perpetrator of these cases of cyber espionage according to the report include china followed by russia and france now china of course has vehemently denied such attacks but that's not stopping the u.s.

from ramping up cyber security for his part president obama is said to be working on an executive order aimed at bolstering cyber security and is expected to announce it as early as this week we'll keep you up to speed as the story develops . a warning now to anyone planning to leave or enter the u.s. the civil rights watchdog of the department of homeland security has ruled that searches and seizures. any and all electronic devices by customs and border patrol is not a violation of a perfect person's privacy the civil rights and civil liberties impact assessment has found that the searches quote comply with the fourth amendment they also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without comment tent another words contributing civil rights civil liberties benefits and here's the best part the searches are allowed to be completely suspicion list and

they apply to anyone within one hundred mile radius of the borders so you see that red line that's going around the map well if you're within that zone like milwaukee or less los angeles or seattle your cell phone and laptop and other electronic devices can be searched without a cause the d.h. has ordered the privacy assessment back in two thousand and nine and the results are actually expected within one hundred twenty days but it's actually been one thousand two hundred days later that we actually get to read these findings so just to discuss this privacy issue i'm joined now by kevin stoller he's a blogger at firedoglake hey there kevin so for quite some time now border agents have been able to search your car and your material possessions suitcases and whatnot were in the digital age is this just the next step in a natural progression. looks like the government would want to be

able to get into anyone's electronic devices and they have been using this authority and power at the border for quite some time. particularly in this so-called post september eleventh attacks world the government has been constructing they just feel they have the ability to intrude on anybody in order to do whatever they want to on behalf of national security now list or active allows border patrol agents to search and see the electronic possessions of travelers within a hundred mile radius of this border as i mentioned earlier but it doesn't define who a traveler is are not that i can find to any extent so according to the a.c.l.u. one hundred ninety million americans fall within a hundred mile radius does that mean that any one of them can be searched. i think it's fair to be concerned that anybody who is strong will be searched or

could be subject to an arbitrary search i think that's what is really troubling about the two page executive summary which is actually the report the department of homeland security is playing a secrecy game here and they didn't release the actual impact assessment they just gave us a summary too to look at and there's no basis for us to understand how they came to these conclusions but the little that they do put down leads us to wonder. people at the border are being discriminated against is that an issue you acknowledge that people are complaining and so i think that this is this is a reality that people are being stopped and that they are being arbitrarily handled while there's also a lot of loopholes in this law that i was able to read into anyway authorities are not allowed to discriminate against people by race or gender but they also don't need to have reason for searches the agents are supposed to act here to federal standards when it comes to business secrets medical documents lawyer client interactions except but then again if they find criminal activity they don't have

to prove they don't have to necessarily protect that information can you talk about a little bit more about these loophole and really does it make room for them to go about and search anything on anyone. well i think that we have to go individual by individual because there are going to be people that are coming through the border government agents for this stuff so the reason why i put it in those terms is just maybe put a face on it to say that the a.c.l.u. has a couple cases that they are pursuing in the courts against how people have been other devices have been taken from them so for example david house the bradley manning support network co-founder is an individual who had the donor lists for these people who are donating to this group that's supporting a person who has helped a organization allegedly providing information to wiki leaks and then there's another individual pascoe abby door a twenty six year old u.s.

french dual citizen who they are defending in the courts because he had his electronic devices taken from him when he was at the border and this was mostly probably because of his nationality or fact he had been detained and held in the south. just consider the individuals here because i think these policies are being used on people on an arbitrary basis and in the case of pascal his computer was actually says for eleven days back in two thousand and ten and what they had found was a bunch of pictures were guarding hezbollah and it turns out that he's actually a student studying arabic studies in canada but another interesting point that i want to bring up is the t.h.s. said that one thousand of these electronic searches happened between two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine but then they later laced a report that said that five hundred five thousand five hundred of these searches happened between two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine ten so either the

first calculation was wrong or the d.h.s.s. ramped up the search is five fold in a year what chad do you think is more likely. i mean it's tough to draw any conclusions because the department of homeland security is it transparent so you know these figures who's to say that they're using different metrics in order to come up with these figures i guess until we can actually see the full report and we can actually have this supposed watchdog produce the actual report that i think the public is entitled to see it's hard for me to to talk about what they're officially concluding ok you may not be able to talk about that but let's talk about this do you think that when they say that they don't have to have suspicion i mean what is how much can a person protect themselves in their electronic devices and their personal information you know i think that's the issue that's why the a.c.l.u.

is bringing these cases in courts because it is clear that if you are in this position where you want to cross the border and get back to the united states not keep in mind you're a citizen you live in the united states we're not talking about immigrants if you want to get back home but you want to keep your electronic devices from being intruded upon by government agents there is no way to prevent the use officers or agents from getting into your devices and even seizing them and. we're out of time but kevin i saw a blogger at firedoglake we appreciate you man on the show thank you president obama and congress have valid to make immigration reform a top priority of us here including this new senate bipartisan reform an expansion to be home with the guest worker program now the u.s. has had a long history of guest worker programs which critics say exploiting cheap labor and benefits only big bennett business r.t.s. is wrong the lindo takes

a look back at the history behind this program. in spanish cross out means a man who works with arms and have but in american lingo they are called lifesaver there are several program brought millions of guest workers from mexico to the u.s. between one thousand nine hundred two in one thousand nine hundred sixty four on the terms like e. when you got here the first thing that would do is take off all your close up of many americans know little about the nation's largest guest worker experiment screening the d.d.t. . as i said it was at the border it was. an straits everybody as soon as agents. you know. people were treated like animals present day debate over immigration reform makes the story of the brass seto's increasingly relevant as he was god on pick crops across the u.s. during world war two he's still helping fellow but i said those collect earnings they were owed from decades ago as the police thousand we'll soon to be that this

country the u.s. forgets that thanks to the hard work of immigrants it was able to win the war we'll have that. the one they have them via the agricultural industry lobbied for that i said a program arguing that world war two would bring labor shortages however historian and filmmaker gilbert gonzalez argues that farmers took advantage of desperate immigrants to bring down wages and stop union organizing in the fields they have one hundred forty strike between thirty. there is a one strike that occurs throughout the twenty two years later program it paralyzed the labor movement from the orchards here in california to the confines of the south millions of guest workers came to work long hours and under brutal conditions during the one thousand forty's fifty's and sixty's make agriculture exploited this farm workforce for their profit knowing that the boss adults couldn't stand up for their rights they could be brought in they could be thrown out if they started

organize. so there are. as one person called it they were growers dream today a guest worker provision is a contentious portion of immigration reform president obama's proposal makes no mention of it but the bipartisan gang of eight in the senate are insisting on it they're all types of industries in our country which have used of the work of immigrants every day to achieve the economic goals of those industries in the days of the best seto's employers routinely ignored regulations worker advocates point out that migrant laborers are still taking advantage of look at the conditions under which agricultural workers live now conditions have not changed in over one hundred years at a time of mass deportations they continue to work or abuse it needs to be seen if the us is doomed to repeat it starkie history in los angeles ramon the lindo r t. the t.s.a. has added yet another critic to

a long list of people already speaking out against the agency were now in shell as alvin gerhardt is speaking out now against the t.s.a. after agents snapped his rare cello in to the cello was a one of a kind heinrich punt it was broken by air security staff in chicago's o'hare international airport as it examine the cases contents on february sixth of this year her heart was in route to the mast and symphony orchestra in wisconsin musician described the incident as quote an act of brutal and careless behavior gerhart says that he suspects the t.s.a. agents performing the search put the cello in its case carelessly and then forced it shut consequently breaking it now this isn't the first time a musician's instrument has been destroyed back in two thousand and one we're now in polish pianist a renowned polish pianist actually had his piano confiscated and destroyed so just goes to show the t.s.a. has a lot of enemies on its hands and make him up as i see back here at five. is

trying to get you know. but it's also a treasure. it's worth fighting for. and the trap was no way our. technology innovation all the developments around. the future are covered.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. showing corporations are on the day. the eat sleep say.